Pezzner Fuses Techno with Cabaret at Seattle's Can Can

There's a stellar YouTube video featuring multiple Dave Pezzners. You've got the real, original Dave Pezzner, who queues up a bright and snazzy big horn opener track in characteristic Pezzner style—not self-important, in a state of ego-less goofing and tweaking knobs with deft precision. Then another Pezzner emerges, listless and disaffected, standing against a wall and texting, almost mocking the efforts of DJ Dave. Another bored Pezzner texter arrives, and then an onslaught of others: a belly-shirt-and silk-kimono-clad Dave raising his hands to the roof, and another wearing a silicon unicorn head mask with a faded Manson tee and yachty blue blazer. DJ Dave chugs a beer and bops around to the beat along with his other various iterations, save for the texting fellow, who remains unmoved and consumed with his phone. This subtly humorous commentary on human nature is very Dave, very irreverent, and very silly.

All of these video Pezzners mirror the proliferating talent of the real and wholly dynamic human. Pezzner is a longtime friend, and I've seen him in many varieties: performing live with a sock monkey, tearing up the dancefloor at Seattle's Baltic Room in 2003, getting married to his longtime partner and wife Christina in an outdoor wedding, and honing his skills throughout years of genius as he traversed disco to tech and house productions.

And now he's an unlikely orchestrator of electronic big band carnival music. He's a father and family man devoted to his wife and partner of twenty-eight years. He's a good friend. He's a DJ and producer who actually dances to the performances of other DJs. He's supportive, smart, kind, and a true renaissance man of the modern era.

I caught up with Dave to discuss his latest efforts as the composer and music producer of Seattle's Can Can Culinary Cabaret. The Can Can is a historic venue situated in the Pike Place Market featuring campy, rhinestone-encrusted pop culture-infused performances with zombie cheerleaders and Dolly-Parton-themed shows. Yes, a techno producer can also create a big band, Polka Core movement—underpinned by quaking 808 samples, of course.

Sara Crow: How the hell are you?

Dave Pezzner: Ah, I'm doing good. Super busy right now.

Sara: Why so busy?

Dave: We're prepping for a new show at the Can Can called "Carnival." It's the Can Can's twentieth anniversary, and this show is a nod to the early years of the theater. A lot of the Can Can shows have historically had a circus sideshow sort of vibe, with music influences ranging from classic cabaret and Brazilian Carnival to Balkan genres and even Tom Waits.

So yeah, I'm in the crunch, and it's not particularly easy. Carnival is a very forgiving style of music because there's a lot of dissonance, weirdness, and many imperfections. But then, you know, I'm doing it with computers, and it's not computer music, so that's kind of the tricky part. Making the music sound believable.

Sara: So, meaning that you're using software to create the music?

Dave: Yeah, I'm using Ableton Live. I have tons of acoustic orchestral sounds that sound very realistic with everything from guitars and accordions to full orchestra strings, violins, and cello. I've got loads of big band brass sounds and try to get them to sound authentic. Like real orchestral music, as if I hired a whole team of instrumentalists. I'm using libraries from Spitfire, Orchestral Tools, Native Instruments, and a whole host of others.

Sara: What's your go-to library?

Dave: My go-to library for orchestral stuff right now is the Spitfire BBC orchestra. It has a very rich and full sound, and each instrument is hugely dynamic, so I have lots of control over the expressiveness of my music. It's become somewhat of a standard library that most composers use.

If I want some strings that are a little more weird and nuanced, I dig further into Spitfire's alternative solo strings or customize one of the Cremona Quartet strings from Native Instruments Komplete. I have an EastWest Composer Cloud account, and it's pretty good. You pay a monthly fee to access their huge library of content. It's similar to what you'd get with Spitfire BBC Orchestra. It's basically more orchestral stuff, but each sound is nuanced differently.

For big band brass, I have four different libraries that I pull from, but the one that I use the most is Glory Days Horns by Orchestral Tools, based in Berlin. The library is essentially five saxophones, four trombones, and four trumpets, and it has a nice set of horn mutes with weird, old-timey sounding trombones and trumpets, and they all sound very realistic when they're played just the right way. What I love about this library is the ability to dive into the Kontakt patches and modify the instruments into something otherworldly.

I try to take a leftfield approach, you know. I look at it backwards and think, "How can I infuse sound design into this orchestral piece so that it can sound unique and fun?" So I'm usually finding myself manipulating the sounds or getting into the instruments and tweaking the way they play so that they can come off sounding like Pezzner.

Sara: Do you have your own instruments that you sample yourself?

Dave: Yeah! I have a kazoo. I have, like, a really nice kazoo. Do you want to see the kazoo?

Sara: Yeah!

Dave: (Wielding kazoo on Zoom) I don't get to show people my kazoo very often. Check it out. It looks like a vape pen. It works well for the circus stuff.

Sara: That's a deluxe kazoo situation. How did you discover this kazoo?

Dave: I went online and googled "pro kazoo."

Sara: Professional, strategic shit right there.

Dave: Yeah! And sure enough, I found this one. The highest-tier pro kazoo is like $14.

Sara: That's an investment. Please tell me that you also have a cowbell.

Dave: I do. I have a cowbell and an agogo bell. I have a whole box full of percussion. The studio here is not the best acoustic environment: it's a one-bedroom apartment in Pike Place Market, and it's very small, and I had to put up sound traps everywhere to control the resonance in the room so I can hear what my music sounds like.

But when I record percussion instruments here, they don't always have the oomph I'm looking for, and I usually need to work fast, so I tend to lean into my sound library. Native Instruments Komplete has a decent host of realistic sounding percussion, and I'll lean into Heavyocity's Damage and Damage 2 for those epic bombastic hits. I do have a tambourine that I use all the time.

Photos from Seattle's Can Can Culinary Cabaret.

Sara: So, the Can Can show premise is loosely rooted in burlesque, but it’s a cabaret type of revue show, right?

Dave: The Can Can is unique within its own genre of theater because it's a dinner theater, and it's not your traditional burlesque or traditional cabaret. It floats somewhere between burlesque cabaret and musical theater, and there's a bit of stand-up comedy rolled up in there. Most of the performers sing and are incredibly talented vocalists. So part of our goal is to put together music that helps them shine.

The songs are tailored around their vocal range and paced so they can feel the most comfortable belting them out twice a night for five nights a week. All the shows have their own storylines. So there's a full-on narrative that goes from beginning to end with resolve. And all of the dialog between the actors on stage is punctuated by these musical numbers.

Sara: There are lots of sequins, sparkly things, and glitter.

Dave: Oh yeah, hella sparkles. In our Dolly Parton-themed summer show last year called Dolly, I heard that [costume designer] Shadou [Mintrone] had sewed on some immeasurable thousands of rhinestones into the costumes. And they had like little jewels all over everything. It was sparkly as fuck.

Sara: Dolly reigns in sparkles: the glitter queen. So, what's your work process?

Dave: I work closely with Chris Pink, the music director, founder, and one of the owners at the Can Can. He concepts the shows, writes the stories, and directs. Our shows are usually built on top of the music, so we usually start riffing on ideas early.

Chris and I will use Spotify as a sort of mood board for the general vibe before I even get into the actual production of the music. The mood board for "Carnival" has all kinds of ideas: various classic Carnivale tunes by Al Sweet, Erik Satie, Henry Filmore, and the like. I added some of my favorite classical waltzes and film score music. The playlist I'm pulling from includes music by Carmille Saint-Saëns, Alfred Schnittke, Astor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Pugiese, Martin Denny, Cristobal Tapia De Veer, and other pop music from the early aughts as inspiration for possible covers.

The music is also informed by what is needed for choreography and lights. So I'll often get calls from our choreographer, Fae Pink, or our technical production designer, Robbie Matos, who designs the lights for our shows. Fae records the numbers as she is choreographing, and as I update the music, I’ll pull these videos into Ableton to see what's happening onstage. I think this is a super critical part of what I do for them.

I don't think there is a show that we've done where we haven't covered a tune, right? In the show we are running right now, Noir, we covered "Golden Slumbers" by the Beatles, "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse, and some Kinks songs. And Dolly featured a ton of '80s music. It was like yacht rock and '80s love songs that were spun into the style of Dolly Parton doing this sort of Johnny Cash meets Nancy Sinatra outlaw country kind of thing.

These ideas usually materialize in my creative briefings with Chris early on, where we brainstorm it all. I don't particularly find country music "sexy" and danceable, especially current country music, but there is some common ground in classic Western from the '50s and '60s and some of the French and Italian takes on the genre, like Spaghetti Western. There's always a spin on the covers we make, almost like a mash-up of styles. The Winehouse "Back to Black" cover was in the style of Balkan party music with accordions and tubas and loads of bass.

Sara: Like hardcore Polka.

Dave: Yeah, totally. I wish I could come up with a really witty name for that style, like Polka Core.

Sara: Klezmer Core. Awesome.

Dave: Yes. What's fun is that I'm always infusing my electronic know-how into everything. So, everything is backed with techno kick drums, at least a little bit. If there's a tuba sound, that tuba gets the underlay of an 808 bass. So it's a tuba sound that rattles the room. The only way I know how to make something sound good is to infuse the things that I love about electronic sounds, and you know, I can't hire an actual big band, so if it's not going to sound exactly like that, then I probably would want to lean into the sound design version of that.

Sara: Do you think your work as a composer in these different genres has changed your overall approach to electronic music production?

Dave: Absolutely. My workflow has changed dramatically to speed up the time-consuming process of articulating each sound to play as realistically as possible. I also have a new relationship with music theory that I never really had when I was solely producing house music.

My approach to house music was so pointed at experimentation and audio manipulation. While I have always brought that approach into my work as a composer, it's almost impossible not to use my new tools and knowledge in my own electronic composition. All of my new electronic music seems to have some element of acoustic orchestral undertone.

Sara: Awesome. I think that can help create a layered and fuller sound with more depth. Are you using AI in your approach to music production or composition?

Dave: I'm actually going downstairs today to record Zoltar from the classic Zoltar fortune-telling machine so I can create an AI model of his voice. AI voice models are a thing I've been doing a lot for the Can Can. I started using RVC and So-Vits-SVC a couple of years ago. These apps use AI to create voice models that can be applied to other recordings.

So basically, say I want to create a narration for a Carnival show that uses the literal voice of Zoltar, I can do that using RVC by recording as many samples of the machine as I can and have the RVC software create a small dataset of the various inflections in Zoltar's voice. These inflections are matched to audio that I import into the software, and the software generates new audio that is matched with his voice.

I've also had some luck using this software to create models of our performers’ voices. This is helpful when I'm writing covers for the Can Can because I can use RVC to hear what our performers sound like when they sing these tunes. To do this, I'll use another AI application called RipX to isolate the vocal from the tune we are covering and then convert that vocal to our performer's voice using RVC.

Generally, if the AI voice comes out sounding unnatural, this might be a clue that the tune is out of their vocal range. It was insanely helpful using this when we were doing the "Dolly" show because so many of the tunes in the show were mashed-up medleys of pop tunes. It's easier for everyone to conceptualize the idea for these mash-ups when they can hear examples of who is singing what part and how they are supposed to sing them.

From an experimental angle and my electronic productions, I've had some luck using RVC to create models of non-human sounds and applying them to other non-human sounds. For instance, I created a model of a solo saxophone jazz performance and applied it to something that I wrote with a synthesizer. The result is a synthesizer melody that has all of the sound and nuance of this jazz recording, almost as if I placed the synthesizer into the saxophone and recorded it in the same room as the original sax.

Sara: Awesome! Any Pezzner tracks slated for 2025?

Dave: Nope! Unfortunately, the work I do during the day absorbs so much of my time that I only have small moments here and there to work on my own tunes. I have several tracks finished, but I don't want to start trying to find a home for them until I have more music to present to the labels.

But I think the benefit to switching to full-time work for the theater is that I'm not pressed to crack out electronic jams as quickly as possible just to pay the bills, so I'm giving myself the space I need to detail my tunes in my own time. I have no gigs and no releases on the table, and I'm actually finding a lot of peace in that.

Visit Pezzner at pezzner.com and follow him on SoundCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bluesky. Learn more about the Can Can at thecancan.com and listen to some of Can Can's music on Spotify. Pezzner's DJ video is by Sean Fischer | Plamphaus for Dirtybird Records.